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Friday, August 10, 2012

Review: Tales from the Land of the Sufis by Mojdeh Bayat and Mohammad Ali Jamnia

Tales from the Land of the Sufis by Mojdeh Bayat and Mohammad Ali Jamnia. Boston, Massachusetts, Shambhala Publications; 1994. 179 pp, paperback.
When I picked up this book, I assumed it would simply be texts attributed to Sufi masters. The authors inserted some of their own biographical materials about those Sufi masters and some historical background to Sufism and their own beliefs. I thought these insertions were too much in the first third of the book, but overall they struck a good balance.

Keep in mind that the narrations in this book are focused on the Sufi masters from Persia or whose Persian books survived. It is not a comprehensive list of all of Sufi masters.

I enjoyed the tales very much. Would that I abandon my attachments to this impermanent world so that I could better understand them!